According to Nasa’s site a falcon heavy launch will be happening. Upon investigation on Gunter’s Space Page I found that it will also be carrying multiple Amateur Radio Sats.
E-TBEx-a and E-TBE-b format information https://exploration.engin.umich.edu/blog/?page_id=3257 Also has TLE the they should have. So this can help us get TLE for some other sats depending on how they are ejected from the Falcon Heavy.
We have a launch coming up this Monday night and it would be great to get some help tracking, especially those first few beacons. The TBEx mission will be studying plasma bubbles near the equator. Initial details are here: https://exploration.engin.umich.edu/tbex/.
Launch time is scheduled for 24 June 2019 23:30 EDT / 25 June 2019 03:30 UTC. It’s a night launch of a Falcon Heavy. Should be spectacular.
I moved the posts on the already opened thread for the launch. I’m going to add the satellites during the weekend. @jwc Thanks for the extra info and the TLE.
In you thread you had a title that the launch is going to happen on 2019-06-25, is there any source for that change? My knowledge until now is that it wil go up on 2019-06-24.
Some interesting info:
Prox 1 signal encoding schema: http://prox-1.gatech.edu/beacon.html
LightSail-2 is going to be launched from Prox 1 ~1 week after the deployment
StangSat is going to deployed with CP9 LEO, both are going to measure and record launch parameters while being into their P-POD during the launch. As StangSat relies for communication to CP9 through WiFi both will be RF active during the launch, which is prohibited by cubesat specification, as an experiment.
And then StangSat will not be active after ejection from the P-POD but it will still be ejected. So we will have atleast 1 more TLE then active satellite.
I’m going to add TLEs to satellites ~20h before launch, which means that we will be able to schedule them in network. Most of the satellites are in UHF so I’m going to schedule them almost equally. I’m going to schedule a few more observations for TBEx-A and TBEx-B as there is the request above and also is the only one that gave us initial TLEs.
These TLEs will be used for the rest of the satellites too and hopefully they will be enough.
Lightsail-2 will be deployed from prox-1 after 1 week, so its TLE will be added later. Maybe by then Prox-1 will have already a NORAD ID to follow. Until assigning TLEs, Lightsail-2 will not be available for scheduling.
So do we have information on what sats are going into what orbits?
I see that TBEX-A/B are going into an 18 degree inclination orbit, which is going to rule out high-elevation observations from a lot of the european stations (and gives my station #232 in Australia a max elevation of maybe 12 degrees!).
Unfortunately with no info for the rest of the satellites I’ve chosen randomly TLEs from the three available. As the TLE from PSat-2 and from TBEx A and B are giving orbits with significant difference, maybe the rest satellites are not heard immediately.
I’ll keep looking around for TLEs, please comment here if you find anything useful about the satellites and their orbits.
good point I didn’t notice!